Your Waiting for a Train
by Tin-Can-Hit-man
Summary: Dreamers and their trains.
1. Chapter 1

You're waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don't know for sure...

Let me tell you a little something about this train...

The train is one line; one gray-striped rectangular prism, one bullet on wheels; it heads from where you want to be to where you have to be, and back.

I rode the train one night, I rode it back, from the place I had to be to the place I wanted to be. Sooner or later I was next to a young man with a briefcase in his hand. Later than sooner, he and I were as familiar as two hydrophilic molecules in a bowl of soup. I know I am dreaming. I can see the subtleties, the unusualness, yet, it doesn't matter. How can it not matter?

Each car of a train, wherever it's coming from and wherever it's going, is its own little, rectangular world. Whether I sit or stand, I aspire to be like that train, to be a long sequence of ordered dreams. Whether I have a seat on the end or a seat in the middle, if I am sitting, I am watching. Who's going to get off the train next? Who's going to stay on?

When I sit, I can see everyone in that rectangular world. When one leaves, I grow sad. A woman who boarded the train is getting off at a grim neighborhood. What's she doing there this time of night? Why's she leaving our team of fearless passengers? Does she, too, believe in the curse, that if you travel with people for too long, you start to share the same dreams? An old man who looks retired, on the other hand, gets off at a place where people can physically do nothing other than _live_.

You wake up in the morning, and it's so cold you hardly remember that it makes you sad to see people you've never met becoming people you'll never meet. Morning comes, day flows like a river, and it hits night like a rock, and you're on your way back to the place you want to be, which you made with your own two hands, and you start seeing people invisibling themselves from you. It's like a piece of ice lodged in a lung. It makes you feel young. It makes your breath cold. It makes you feel old.

Some nights, there's frustration. The windows are fogged with men and women's breath. There are no children here. I'm in a tunnel beneath the earth. I look at the windows and think, there are so many people in here, I can't even see outside! I don't think, "There's nothing outside those windows" because the windows are fogged. And if the windows weren't fogged, I'd feel irritated at the people blocking the view. And if the people weren't blocking the view, then I'd look out and feel disappointed. This all has to do with my mood. Terrible moments birth temporary disasters. I sleep, I learn.

I think, "Is this train ever going to stop?" What if it doesn't? How full would it grow? Once it reached the end, how much farther would it go?

I think of myself sometimes, confidently, as a person who does things differently. As an individual rather than a team player. The question of where the train would go had bothered me for a while. Because I knew deep down that the answer wasn't as important as the fact that if no one else got off the train, I wouldn't get off, either. It was kind of the inverse of the question "if all your friends were jumping off a bridge, would you jump off, too?" See, jumping off the bridge requires _action_. It requires climbing up that bridge. It requires being with your friends.

Last night, the miracle occurred; the train stopped — at least in my car. The train was packed. The person I'd been inching closer and closer to over the last eighteen minutes, the person who'd been like an adjacent molecule in a drop of water, had become first like an adjacent atom in a molecule, and eventually like a fellow orbiting electron, and finally, we were like protons in a nucleus. Though wearing a smart suit, he was young, maybe younger than me. He looked like a guy who admired those who admired those who made beautiful things. This, and he was having trouble with a girl. He whispered, as the train rolled to a stop,

"I get sick when royals betray their retainers  
I cringe when the contents outweigh their containers  
I hate brain teasers and despise no-brainers  
Tell me, where can I find the slack to maintain her?"

I went on thinking, restlessly. The train stopped, stopped to breathe. I took in a breath of the cold air.

"I'm getting off this train," I said. "Get out of the way." No one moved. It was like a nightmare involving a train. "Get out of the way." I swiveled around jumped out the door and fell off the platform.

The train went on, like a rolling stone. Past the last stop, where no moonlight shone. It wobbled and rocked like an odd pebble thrown; fell of the edge of the earth, died full and alone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Okay so originally I had meant for this to be a one chapter thing. But, I had this dream that I should add more. So here's chapter 2. **

**Also, I know all this stuff is a little weird... but I think it's ok…just uh be patient…and umm laugh where appropriate and stuff…**

**Even if you're not gonna read the whole thing…thanks for clicking on it…I mean it…**

I once met this girl who lost her dreams.

She didn't drop it into the gutter on accident. It didn't contract a rare disease and fade away in a hospital. She didn't cut it off while steadying a tourniquet with her teeth.

Rather, her dreams left her like a male animal leaves its young. In the middle of the night, it understands that what it has made has grown the need to not need it anymore.

I ended up meeting her because she worked in an office. Her uniform involved being nice to everyone no matter what she thought. It wasn't a bad job. All she had to do was be nice to everyone. I don't know what else she did. I only knew she wasn't supposed to tell her co-workers her job was just to be nice because I didn't work with her. I saw the side of her that wasn't nice to anybody, and wasn't mean to anybody, either.

She wore what magazines told her, and she never trusted a theory. She lived in an apartment wide enough to touch the walls with the tips of her toes. She never invited anyone up there if she'd been nice to them beforehand.

She was scheduled to arrive at the office at nine, so she was contracted to show up at eight-thirty. She'd sit there looking good as people trickled in. She'd make coffee and smile.

She could not physically tolerate feeling bad about herself. She set her cellular phone alarm and felt horrible in the morning. She did this every day until her twenty-second birthday. She stopped feeling horrible, and hasn't felt horrible since. I would wake up on her floor on Saturday mornings or Wednesday mornings, and she'd be watching television, eating granola, touching her toes, and bathing in the cold (or hot) humid (or dry) air of morning. She'd put on her makeup, and gaze at the wall.

I had feelings in my bones. I had a shard of ice lodged in the meat of my chest. I'd wake with aches and roll over; I'd massage my back with the joints of my hands. Sometimes birds were singing; sometimes bikes were squeaking down the hill. I got up to use the bathroom, and she sat on her bed touching her toes, painting her toes, blinking at a mirror, and eating granola.

"You should be going soon," she'd say.

One Sunday night, something hit her in her sleep, and she rolled over with a gasp. I was still awake, watching the ceiling for intruders.

"I did a terrible thing when I was younger," she eventually said. "I disappointed everyone. They all hated me. They loathed me, for years and years."

"It's all in the past now."

"There is no past," she said.

When I left on Saturdays, and spent the day in bookstores staring at pages, or in music stores listening to CDs, in no place no one had ever told me I had to be, did she stay there staring at the wall? Did she wear her suit and stockings? Did she drink her black coffee and go on eating toast like that until bedtime?

She never told me any tales. She never spoke a story. Her body was a legend. Sleeping, it fell alone into a world I couldn't see. Awake, once, I criticized her:

"Don't you notice the trains are empty when you sleep? Don't you notice the world wakes more slowly than you do? Don't you notice it's always crumbling, every night? Don't you realize the dreams can't end?"

She told me nothing mattered. She said it's all the same. She said life took her dreams morning and erased it from her brain.

I told her, "Your dream is your only vitamin, your last reminder that you're sane." I said, "It's not the dates or names that matter, it's that you're late for your train."

She said, we don't need these reminders, she told me we'd be perfectly fine. She asked me please, to live to a hundred. She said she'd do the same. She asked me to work, to be frustrated; she said if not we'd lose our minds. She said she'd not change until we died.

She said, "Why I don't love you I don't know; you look like someone I loved before. If I love you, please don't go; I promise not to love you anymore."

When I left for my train she was still touching her toes. I took my vitamin and awoke feeling unaccustomed to the touch of the world. My dream told me I could do better. I did precisely that. My dream told me reality would not trouble me; it indeed did not. My world morning told me I was dreaming. I drank my dreams down.

She was somewhere, still touching her toes, painting her fingernails the color of the noontime sun.

She grew up, and old, away from me. She inherited a parrot, and grew sick, away from me. One winter, cursing failure, she set the parrot's cage outside. Not so much a thing with a purpose as a method a man uses to throw away his child, the first and last word the thing had learned before the old lady died was the sound of a human cough.


End file.
